12 January 2016

Electrophysiological correlates of processing Noun-Noun compounds

This project investigates the processing of noun-noun compounds by very advanced learners of English, whose mothertongue features either the same word order (i.e. German) or the opposite word order (i.e. Spanish).  We recorded reaction times (Study 1) and Event-Related Potentials (Study 2) in a judgement-elicitation task.  State-of-the-art analysis using Mixed-Effects Modelling and Generalised Additive Modeling revealed clear word-order effects in non-native processing, even in trials with target-like performance.

This project has been Funded by the Leeds Humanities Research Institute (University of Leeds) and by a British Academy Quantitative Skills Acquisition Award.

Collaborators: Dr. Ekaterini Klepousniotou (IPS, U of Leeds) and Prof. Harald Baayen (U of Tuebingen, Germany)

Occasional research Assistants: Natasha Rust, Raphael Morschett, Chris Norton, Kremena Koleva

Outputs to date:
  • De Cat, C. and Klepousniotou, E. (2012) Residual indeterminacy in a core grammar phenomenon: evidence from the processing of Noun-Noun compounds.  Poster presented at GALANA (Kansas, October 2012).  (pdf)
  • De Cat, C., Klepousniotou, E. & Baayen, R. H. (2014). Electrophysiological correlates of noun-noun compound processing by non-native speakers of English.  Proceedings of the 25th International Conference on Computational Linguistics. Stroudsburg, PA: ACL. (pdf)
  • De Cat C, Klepousniotou E and Baayen H (2015). Representational deficit or processing effect? An electrophysiological study of noun-noun compound processing by very advanced L2 speakers of English. Frontiers in Psychology. 6:77. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2015.00077
  • Baayen, R. H., van Rij, J., De Cat, C. & Wood, S. (2017). Autocorrelated errors in experimental data in the language sciences: Some solutions offered by Generalized Additive Mixed Models. In Speelman, D., Heylen, K., and Geeraerts, D. (Eds.) Mixed Effects Regression Models in Linguistics. Berlin, Springer.  arXiv 1601.02043 [stat.AP]
Conference presentations:
  • GALANA 2012
  • CoLing 2014 (First Workshop on Computational Approaches to Compound Analysis)
  • EuroSLA 2014